Sis Boom Bah

by Jane Heller

  Sharon peered at the couple. “Not for much longer. I’m no lip-reader, but I could swear he’s breaking up with her.”

  “Vicky does seem pretty distraught,” I acknowledged. Vicky had just thrown her soggy cocktail napkin at Dr. Hirshon’s face, where it attached itself to his beard, then dropped to the floor. “Come on, let’s give them some privacy, Sharon. Ending a relationship is hard enough without people staring at you.”

  I turned to go, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “You don’t think we should walk over and say hello?” she asked. “It might give Dr. Hirshon moral support to know that we’re hot for him. I mean, here for him.”

  “We can be here for him tomorrow, at the hospital,” I offered.

  “I suppose.” She cast a final stare at the bar before permitting me to drag her out the door.

  When we saw Dr. Hirshon the next morning, he looked as chipper as he had the day before.

  Vicky, on the other hand, looked dreadful.

  As for my mother, she was much improved, physically, according to her array of monitoring devises; emotionally, however, she was a wreck, convinced that every muscle spasm, every gas pain, every twinge and twitch signaled another heart attack.

  Dr. Hirshon was extremely understanding. He sat beside her on the bed, stroked her hand, told her in a soft, reassuring tone that she was right to ring for the nurse if she felt discomfort—any discomfort. He was kind and gentle with her, which touched me immensely and led me to believe that he was not a heartless cad for breaking up with Vicky at the Prawnbroker, but was a gentleman for bringing to a merciful end a relationship that was not to be.

  Wow, now he really is free, I thought as I watched him try to jolly my mother out of her anxiety. Now, he’ll be in the market for a new lady friend.

  As if reading my mind, Dr. Hirshon winked at me.

  My mother’s angiogram showed that she had suffered only minor damage from the heart attack and that no further procedures were necessary. On Tuesday afternoon, she was moved to the telemetry unit of the hospital, where she spent three days in a private room overlooking the St. Lucie River and ate baked scrod until it was coming out of her ears. Dr. Hirshon checked on her each day, once in the morning and again at night. Not coincidentally, my sister and I were always present on those occasions.

  On Thursday evening, after examining Mom, he said he was taking a break from his rounds and stopping in the hospital coffee shop for a quick bite. He asked Sharon and me if we wanted to join him. Surprise, surprise; we said yes. Over tuna fish sandwiches and iced tea, he recounted the rather mawkish story of how he came to be a cardiologist. At the conclusion of the story, he suggested that we call him Jeffrey.

  On Friday morning, he pronounced my mother well enough to leave the hospital. While she was putting on her clothes, he wrote prescriptions for her—for tenormin, Lipitor, and nitroglycerin—and instructed us that she should also take one baby aspirin per day, plus a vitamin E capsule.

  “You can buy the aspirin over the counter, of course, but you can only buy the vitamins from my office,” he said. “They’re specially formulated for me under the brand name Heartily Hirshon.”

  “Heartily Hirshon?” I repeated.

  “The name’s corny, I know.” He chuckled. “But the vitamins themselves are the real deal—my foray into the world of the doctor-as-entrepreneur. I set up a little company with a partner, after my patients kept telling me how overwhelmed they were by all the different types of vitamins in the health food stores. I wanted to offer them pure, unadulterated vitamin E—no synthetic substances, no preservatives, no baloney.”

  “That’s very industrious of you, Jeffrey,” Sharon said admiringly. “But why vitamin E and not one of the others?”

  “Vitamin E is an active antioxident, which means it prevents and dissolves blood clots, lowers blood pressure, and promotes general cardiovascular health. It also keeps people looking younger, by the way, not that either of you ladies needs to worry about that.”

  He scribbled something else down on the prescription pad. “Which reminds me: I think it’s time you both had my home phone number. Feel free to call if something comes up.”

  “But you said you prefer it when your service contacts you at home,” I reminded him.

  He smiled. “I changed my mind.”

  He held out the piece of paper. Sharon and I practically dove for it, but she got there first, folded it into tiny squares, and slipped it into her purse.

  Having Mom home brought new challenges. Sharon and I had assumed that she’d bounce back once she returned to familiar surroundings, that after resting up for a day or two, she’d be her old independent, don’t-fuss-over-me self, even return to her job as a mediator. But while she took her medicine without objection and put up with the low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-sodium diet Dr. Hirshon had prescribed and walked obediently on the treadmill we’d bought her, she wasn’t her old self; she had metamorphosed into a frightened child, a seventy-five-year-old who acted as if she’d been given a death sentence instead of a clean bill of health.

  “Maybe we should call Dr. Hirshon,” Sharon suggested that first weekend after my mother complained of chest pains.

  So we did. Or, should I say, Sharon did. She dialed his home number, and when he answered she described the situation to him. He told her it was probably nothing to worry about but that she should bring Mom to the emergency room and he would meet them there. I would have gone along, but I had made plans to meet with Melinda about moving into the keeper’s cottage. Besides, Sharon and I had agreed that we would take turns accompanying Mom to the doctor, the hospital, the grocery store; that once Sharon had resumed her life in Boca she would drive up to Stuart twice during the week (she was busy with her weddings on weekends) and that I would help out whenever she wasn’t around. It was such a mature arrangement for us, I thought, this sharing of responsibility for our mother’s care. Or was it something else we were sharing? Someone else?

  The excursion to the emergency room that Sunday was uneventful, thank God, at least in terms of my mother’s heart. As for my sister’s heart, well, that was another matter.

  “He asked me out!” she said while my mother was napping.

  “Who?” I asked, as if I didn’t have a clue.

  “Jeffrey, of course. I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital and he came and sat down next to me, to explain that Mom is going through a stage, psychologically. He looked divine, by the way. No lab coat, just khakis and a forest green polo shirt. Sort of a casual Sunday outfit, you know?”

  I nodded, experiencing a peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Anyhow,” she chirped, “he mentioned that he had two tickets for some opera at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Stuart and wanted to know if I’d go with him.”

  “What did you tell him?” I managed, trying my best to look curious as opposed to covetous.

  “I told him I couldn’t go,” Sharon replied with a sigh of regret. “For one thing, the concert is next Saturday night and I’ve got a wedding down in Delray Beach that starts at seven-thirty. For another, I’m stepping aside and letting you have Jeffrey, remember?”

  “Sharon,” I said, “it sounds like it’s you he’s pursuing. I don’t want to stand in the way of—”

  “I’m doing this for Mom,” she cut me off, “so we won’t upset her. If there’s no man to come between her ‘girls,’ that’s one less thing for us to fight about, right?”

  I regarded my sister. She really was taking the high road this time. I wondered if I would have been so magnanimous if I had been the lucky recipient of Jeffrey Hirshon’s invitation.

  On Monday afternoon, a couple of hours after Sharon had packed up her Louis Vuitton bags and headed back to Boca, my mother was convinced yet again that she was having a second heart attack. I was torn. I didn’t want to pester the doctor, given that he had examined Mom only the day before, but I also didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her health. So I telephoned h
is office. The receptionist put me on hold for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, a woman introducing herself as Dr. Hirshon’s nurse came on the line, asked me what the problem was, and told me to bring Mom into the office. My mother and I piled into the Delta 88 and off we went. I knew she wasn’t her old self because she let me drive.

  Dr. Hirshon’s office was on Osceola Street, a quaint, charming, tree-lined street in downtown Stuart, near the hospital. Unfortunately, the office itself was neither quaint nor charming. It was a huge, impersonal building, because Dr. Hirshon, like many physicians trying to eke out a living in the age of managed care, did not have a solo practice; he was in a sixty-doctor group of multispecialists—urologists, dermatologists, gastroenterologists, you name it. When we walked in the door, I felt as if I’d stepped inside a Home Depot for hypochondriacs.

  While Dr. Hirshon examined my mother, I chatted outside his office with his nurse, the one I’d spoken to on the phone. Her name was Joan, she was in her fifties, and she had mousy, light brown hair worn off her face, in a rather severe bun. She had, she confided to me, worked with the doctor for ten uninterrupted years.

  “So you knew his wife,” I ventured at some point in our conversation, seeing as Joan had initiated the girl talk. “His ex-wife, I should say.”

  “Francine?” She rolled her eyes. “I knew her all right. Poor thing. She’s an addict.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. What is she addicted to?”

  “Shoes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She buys shoes, expensive shoes. Can’t help herself. She has a problem with handbags too. I guess you could say she’s addicted to accessories. Nearly bankrupted the doctor.”

  “That is sad,” I said.

  “What’s sad is the way she keeps harrasing him for money, even though he gave her everything—except, of course, the Porsche, the Hatteras, and the house here in town.”

  A sports car, a boat, and a million-dollar house on the river. Clearly, Dr. Hirshon wasn’t suffering.

  “Well,” said Joan. “I’d better get back to work or the doctor will have my head. He’s got some temper.”

  “You’ve stayed with him for ten years. How bad a temper could it be?”

  “Bad,” she said. “But this job has other compensations.”

  I was about to ask “Like what?” when the doctor himself emerged. Joan scurried back to her desk.

  “Our patient will be out in a minute,” he informed me. “She’s dressing.”

  “I appreciate your seeing her this afternoon,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush, just as they had when I’d first met him. Perhaps it was his resemblance to my father that overwhelmed me. Perhaps it was that we were all placing my mother’s life in his hands that made him appear Godlike to me. Perhaps it was even that Sharon had found him attractive initially and, as a result, out of habit, I viewed him as a trophy. Or perhaps it was that I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Philip, who didn’t really count; that I was hungry for male companionship, for someone to love.

  Whatever the reason for my hot, red face, I couldn’t deny that I felt alive when I was in Jeffrey Hirshon’s company.

  And so I listened attentively to his diagnosis of my mother’s condition. “As I suspected, it’s not a physical problem; it’s the mortality issue,” he said. And then I asked if there was anything I could do to distract her from her morbid thoughts. “It would be wonderful if you could stay in town for a while, Deborah,” he said. “I know Sharon lives in Boca, but I really think your mother could use someone close by. Someone to talk to, do things with.” I smiled and told him I would be in Stuart for the foreseeable future; that within a week or two I was moving into the keeper’s cottage at the House of Refuge. “That’s fantastic,” he said with enthusiasm. “I’m so pleased.” He paused as if an idea had just come to him. “Deborah,” he said, “I’ve got two tickets to a local opera company that’s performing at the Lyric on Saturday night. How about being my date? If you’re not busy.”

  Busy. As if.

  I wanted to go out with Jeffrey in the worst way. It didn’t matter that he had asked Sharon first. It didn’t matter that he neglected to mention that he had asked Sharon first. It didn’t even matter that I hated opera. But, of course, I declined his invitation. If my sister could resist him for my mother’s sake, so, goddamn it, could I.

  Chapter Eight

  On Monday night, I called Sharon to report the emergency trip to Dr. Hirshon’s office (I left out the bit about him asking me out). I told her I was concerned about our mother’s mental state and that I thought we needed a more structured plan for taking care of her—just until she got her sea legs back. Sharon agreed. So we convinced Rose, who cleaned for Mom on Tuesdays, to come in on Fridays too. Sharon said she would drive up and spend Wednesdays and Thursdays at the house. And I would be on duty Saturdays through Mondays.

  The plan worked. By the end of the week, my mother felt less anxious because she had people around her on a regular basis. She started eating and sleeping better, visited with her friends, even tended to her garden again. Rose was happy that she was earning an additional day’s pay. And Sharon was relieved that she could go back to work without having to worry about Mom. The only problem was me. I missed New York. I missed the show. I was desperately lonely.

  I was so lonely that I called Woody. His “manservant” said he had rented a villa in Tuscany and wouldn’t be back in Manhattan for a month.

  I was so lonely that I called Helen. She said that Philip had moved in with the ex-Harlequin editor and that they were talking about adopting a baby from Romania. “But I’ve only been gone a couple of weeks,” I said. “How could all that have happened so fast?” “Philip’s a fast worker, remember?” she clucked and then dished more dirt that I didn’t particularly want to hear.

  I was so lonely that I even called the super at my apartment building, to see if he was forwarding my mail the way he’d promised, since I hadn’t received any. “Always so pesty,” he snarled, surly as ever. “Maybe nobody’s writing to you. Ever think of that?”

  I was so lonely that on the following Monday night, after my mother mentioned that she had strained her arm weeding, I called Dr. Hirshon. At home. To make sure that she wasn’t having another heart attack. “I remembered that the pain can radiate down the left arm,” I said, shoveling the you-know-what. “I didn’t want to take any chances.” He said that, seeing as we were neighbors, he’d be right over.

  I felt like the scheming heroine of an old movie—the type of pathetic woman who fakes the vapors to get the guy to pay attention to her, only in this case it was my mother’s vapors I was faking. Still, I had accomplished my mission: Jeffrey Hirshon was on his way over to my mother’s house, and Sharon was an hour and a half away in Boca.

  While I waited for him to show up, I wondered what he would think of the house, my father’s Shangri-la. It was pretty rustic compared to his place, which I had walked by a few times, hoping he’d be out there mowing the lawn or something. He lived in the High-point section of Sewall’s Point, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, in a two-story, peach-colored, metal-roofed house that had wraparound verandahs and porches, window boxes overflowing with impatiens, and, from what I could see by peeking through the trees, a swimming pool, outdoor Jacuzzi, and boat dock. Not bad for a man whose ex-wife had nearly “bankrupted” him, according to his nurse.

  “Great place,” he said when I opened the door for him. “Sort of your own private Shangri-la.”

  I stared at him.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Not at all.” This man and I are meant to be, I thought. The hell with Sharon.

  I led him upstairs, to my mother’s bedroom. He talked to her more than he actually examined her, asking her where it hurt, asking her if she was short of breath, asking her if she was taking the medications he had prescribed. After a few minutes, he determined that the pain in her arm was due to muscle strain, not cardiac arrest, but he said he was glad we had
gotten in touch with him, as a precaution.

  When he and I were alone, he praised me for being so solicitous of my mother, so caring. “You’re a terrific woman, Deborah,” he said. “Sharon is too, as I’ve discovered from the long phone conversations she and I have had over the past week.” Long phone conversations? Funny, she never uttered a word about them. “I know patients are supposed to develop crushes on their doctors, but I think I’ve got it backwards; I’ve developed a crush on my patient’s daughters.”

  Jeez. He’s coming on to both of us, I thought, feeling slightly creeped out.

  “It’s still early,” he said, checking his watch and then his beeper. “Want to go to a movie? Or have dinner? I’m a fan of the food at the Flagler Grill. I could see if they’ve got a table. Or maybe you’d like to come back to my place.” He grinned. “We could sit and relax, have a drink, discuss this silly crush of mine.” He was standing next to me now, standing over me, really. The tip of his beard was tickling the top of my head.

  Oh, go out with him, I thought. When are you ever gonna get an opportunity like this? A nice man. A nice-looking man. A doctor who saved your mother’s life. A doctor who called your father’s Shangri-la a Shangri-la.

  No! I chided myself. A deal’s a deal. You and Sharon agreed not to go out with Jeffrey Hirshon. You must be strong. You must not succumb to his compliments. You must not jeopardize your mother’s health by fighting with your sister.

  “I’d love to, Jeffrey, but I’ve got to be up early in the morning,” I said. “I’m moving to Hutchinson island to start the job I told you about.”

  “Right. With the Historical Society,” he said. “Sounds romantic, living in that beach cottage. Let me know when you’re ready for company.”

  I’m ready now! I wanted to scream. Take me! Instead, I thanked him for coming over and watched him drive off in his Porsche.

  On Tuesday morning, just after Rose arrived, I loaded my bags into the ‘82 Pontiac I’d bought off a used-car lot on Federal Highway. The thing had over a hundred thousand miles on it and wasn’t exactly in showroom shape, but it had been cheap—amazingly cheap—and I figured it would be fine for tooling around Stuart.